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User blog:Azyle00/Advanced Power Leveling - A Treatise on Buying XP
'Introduction' A concept I have been heavily exploring in Little Empire is the concept of Buying Experience. What this entails is using a specific tactic and method to turn Gold and Crystal into experience. This is already a familiar concept in our average players leveling and from my other guides I talk heavily about how you are essentially buying experience any time you engage in a battle that produces XP but costs you units. The units lost have a cost in Gold, Crystal and Time. The return for your loss is usually experience. Now this is not to say that we always are acting in way that is buying experience. Certainly during your leveling career and especially as we gain more power at higher levels, we start to constantly see a profit in our Arena battles, where we actually gain more Gold and Crystal than we lose in units. This is all dependent upon your current ability, gear, skill and lineups as well as the power curve in leveling, in that you hit a point somewhere in your leveling that you are actually going positive in battles and for some power players, a point where you often do not lose any units in battles, so gain complete profit and are "going infinite" as we like to call it. But this is not an article about that. This is an article about specifically building units in order to sacrifice them and turn them into experience. We do this in two way, "padding" and "losing" battles. 'Who This is For, And Who This is NOT For' Before I get into this method and we look at the real numbers involved in those systems I will describe, we need to understand who exactly this article and information is for. To this, let's look at the types of players in Little Empire: #'The Budget Player' - This player is the type who is spending NO $$$ on Mojo at all in his time playing Little Empire. Either the player cannot afford to spend $$$ on Mojo, refuses to spend $$$ on a "game", likes the Challenge of beating the game without using $$$, cannot use a Credit Card for Paypal and/or Google Wallet payments or he is from an area in the world that Paypal and/or Google Wallet refuses to accomodate. This player must look at the game as a Mojo Leveling game and not an XP leveling game. He is Power Mojoing, not Power Leveling and if he is really smart, he will be avoiding making XP as much as possible because the general concept is the slower you make XP per Wheel of Mojo spin, the better your ability will be to stabilize your Mojo income rate to the other players of the same level as you are. This guide is not for this player type. #'The Casual Player '- This player is less concerned about holding back their XP making in lieu of Mojo making. Likely to spend some money along the way to help the leveling process and usually has the intention that upon reaching the End Game, that they will use $$$ to max out their gear and is waiting to see what exactly that will cost and if they still want play the game at that point. Often they are more than willing to Level up in order to enjoy the game's ever changing landscape and dynamic. However, the pure Power Leveling concept is not that important to them as they strike a balance of good play along with Mojo and Leveling and to aggresively pursue every possible aspect to squeeze every drop out of the system at the fastest rate they can, simply is not their style. This guide will be interesting and informative to this player type, but not used all that much. #'The Power Leveler' - This player is likely to have reset a few times early on and chosen the fastest and most direct path and play style to level up quickly. They have every intention to get to Level 24 as quickly as possible and want to be banging out every drop of XP per day that they can. Once at 24, they plan to Portal and level the Fort Hero fast as well. They have every intention to buy full Uber Gear at the level it becomes available and read just about every guide there has been written about the game to achieve maximum velocity. They see all resources in game, Gold and Crystal as a possible means to level faster and will do everything to turn Gold and Crystal into XP. They are also Power Resource generators and use any means possible to get as much Gold and Crystal as possible via high level friends, Trolling, attacking other players etc etc. Mojo making is important, but because they know at high levels they can go "infinite" and gear out and generate the Mojo even faster, their goal is getting to the top in as little time as possible. This guide is highly useful to them and they will likely use the methods described to further aid their leveling efforts. #'The Uber Player '- This player has absolutely no issue spending $$$ on Mojo from day 1. They know the key spells and equipment that can be purchased along the path upwards on both their main character and their Fort Hero and will buy them in order to get to the top faster. They will gear out their character(s) as best as possible every step of the way and at the top, go totally Uber. They often have many high level friends who are aiding them with Gold and Crystal etc and their main Hero is likely level 35 already and they are currently leveling the Fort Hero as fast as possible. Gold and Crystal are meaningless to them and they have the ability to access those resources almost infinite. This guide is completely for them and is likely describing systems they already know about and are using and have used in the past. So now we know who use this guide after reading the concepts and who should not. So let's examine the methods and ideas to see what merit they have. 'What Do You Mean? Buy XP...' Been asked this question in IRC and mails a few times before and always have tried to explain the concepts as best I could but never had fully detailed the math behind it. The concept is quite simple however; Sacrifice. We sacrifice units we create because their death is worth XP to us. Since we are literally limited in how much XP we can possible make in 1 day no matter what our level (For Example, past level 25, we can fight 144 Arena battles daily at maximum velocity, assuming we win every fight at an average of 250 XP per battle, this means we can only make 36,000 XP per day), if we are trying to power level beyond this limit, then we must use the method of buying XP through sacrifice to gain more than this. 'Methodology' The method is quite simple. You have an extra avenue to gain XP and this XP gain is only limited by your Gold, Crystal and Time. It is not limited by the Arena Refresh Wall and it can be used over and over as fast as you can make the sacrificial Units. It can be done at any level. The primary ways to sacrifice units is through "Padding" or outright "Sacrifice" through Battle Loss. *Padding is used by simply taking the "cost effective" units and filling in your front lines with those units, letting them die every fight in your initial front lines, often backed up by ranged units. This can often be the most porductive use of them because often in lower level fights, you were using Footmen and Trolls as your Front line units and they are much less cost effective than other units for this method. Another method of padding is at the high levels where in a battle, your Hero can roll the other army solo, but you add the units anyways so that they perish during the fight, yet you still win the battle. The key difference from sacrifice through Battle Loss is that you are incorporating their sacrifice into your regular battle wins and often reducing their mean cost because you use those units instead of other cannon fodder. *Sacrifice is used by taking the sacrificial units and entering into a Battle with the intention of watching them all die and taking the loss, but getting the XP. Sacrifice can be done in the Arena, against an Invader who occupies you or merely by using whatever current Task you are on and failing it over and over. The Task has the added bonus of not costing you Rank as the Arena would. *Hero Sacrifice is used by Sacrificing the our Hero, taking the loss but gaining the XP. This can also be done using a "lossless" method. Now not all units are the same as far as the death of our own unit means for the XP we get related to the actual cost. Some are far more efficient than others. First we examine the units for Time cost and we rule out any with long build times. The Archangel, despite having a very low cost for XP gained, takes too long to build and just is not fast enough overall for our use. Furthermore, it is not available for use until a high level and serves little pratical purpose to lower level players trying to even get to the use of Archangels. In fact, when we examine the units that are fastest to produce, we discover the Priest has one of the best cost to XP ratios possible to achieve and a fairly sleek build time, where we can generate 5 Priests from a single Magic Library in one hour. The next best ratio possible is the Shaman, who also allows us to produce 5 in an hour (based on upgraded buildings). So the first factor to examine is our actual cost. We find a Priest can give us a rate of 21 Gold and 16 Crystal per XP point. So using Priests (the best cost scenario) to buy 1,000 XP will cost us 21,000 Gold and 16,000 Crystal. We would need to create 166 Priests to achieve this however. so with a single Magic Library (Level 9 Player), we would take 33 hours of Priest Sacrificing to make 1,000 XP extra. It does not seem like much until you consider that a Level 9 player needs only 2,500 XP to level up. And every time a new Magic Library is added to the Empire, that player can make an additional 1,000 XP in 33 hours for that same price ratio. A level 24 player can be adding an additional 6,000 XP every 33 hours using Priest Sacrifice at a cost of 126,000 Gold and 96,000 Crystal. It is completely realistic for a Level 24 player to be making that much in resources or far more in those same 33 Hours via harvesting and Arena Battles as well as raiding other players. Given that the power player will likely be over geared and have all his End Game spells at that level, it is quite realistic for him to raid other players with a full force and constantly win those invasions, meaning he will have ample resources to Priest Sacrifice non-stop. So in 33 hours, he could make 49,500 XP winning all his Arena Battles and then be adding 6,000 XP to that just using the cheapest unit for Sacrifice alone. But he does not need to stop there either. At level 24, for example, he would also have the ability to create out of two Magic Temples, 10 Shaman per hour which in those 33 hours will be netting him about 3,000 XP for the period. The cost for this would be a mere 69,000 Gold and 45,000 Crystal. Now with just that in place, he has gone from a limit in 33 hours of 49,500 XP available to make, up to 58,500 XP. Given that an aggressive power leveler is more limited by time and not by resources, he does not need to stop short on this. He can add Archers to the mix, another highly cost effect XP Sacrifice that comes from a completely different building. The Level 24 player can roughly 15 Archers per hour from one Shooters Range and will have 6 of them. This is 90 Archers per hour and over that same 33 hour period, he can produce 2,970 and gain 4 XP each for a total of 11,800 XP more. The cost is 495,000 Gold and 120,000 Crystal. Wow. Now he is up to 70,380 XP total over 33 hours, an additional 20,500 XP more than he could have made in the Arena. The total cost for this effort is about 700,000 Gold and 270,000 Crystal. But again the cost is really not the factor as much as time, because that player would be able to raid constantly as well during those 33 Hours and I have made 400K Gold and 200K Crystal raiding other players in less than 5 hours (did this to buy my Portal patch day). It is a completely realistic goal and a power player will easily achieve this in order to get that XP all the faster. The lower level player can do this realizing that Priests are the most cost effective costing half as much as Archers, but taking twice as long. But if they are able to muster the funds, they can make almost the same amount, that 11,800 XP in 33 hours using Archers as the level 24 player as we get access to multiple Barracks at very low levels, specifically, 4 Barracks by Level 10 (8,000 XP per 33), 5 Barracks by Level 13 (10,000 XP per 33) and 6 by Level 15 (12,000 XP per 33) and in fact, this would be far faster than actually fighting Arena Battles at those levels and getting XP via that way as the Battles produce far less and you are actually still losing units in those Battles and basically paying for XP as well, just at a subdued rate. The last method idea to be touched upon is Hero Sacrifice. This can be done at any Level although it would be far more popular and useful at lower levels. When your Hero dies in battle, you get 7 or 8 XP for him dieing and it costs you 600 Gold and 100 Crystal to revive him which would make his rate about 33% more costly than an Archer for Gold and far more costly than a Priest or Shaman. However, does it really cost Gold and Crystal to Revive him? Not if you are broke. He still will be alive and you will suffer ZERO cost. Wow. Now that seems like a really good deal. Furthermore, the Hero has no build time, so ZERO time cost to ourselves. Uhh...hold on here...and how fast can we do this? Amazingly fast. So fast it is something that Camel Games likely needs to fix. But for now, it is there. It is damn monotonous, but it seriously can produce the fastest XP outside of Arena battles in the game. After timing myself, going as fast as I can click away at the system and with zero equipment on, I can complete this "loop" in about 10 seconds. Especially picking the right task, with for example, Knights beating on you. Even based on 7 XP each time, it ends up being just over 2,500 XP per hour. So in that same 33 hours that you spent a TON of resources trying to squeak out an extra 2,000 to 3,000 XP using Priests and Troll sacrifice, you have managed to spend ZERO and gain 83,000 XP. Of course you would have to play for 33 hours straight but I think you get the point. You could go from Level 2 to 15 in a simple 12 hours of non-stop Hero Sacrificing. But beware, I have no idea what Camel Games mood regarding such a method may or may not be and one must consider that this is likely deemed cheating and could get you banned. But who knows if they watch for it or even care as they are likely busy counting all the money they are making from selling Mojo for $$$. However you decide to get XP, max out XP or use your resources I wish you the best of luck and above all else, at least get a good laugh along the way and enjoy yourself. Good Luck and Good Hunting. Category:Blog posts Category:Blog posts